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Saturday, April 12, 2008

Get a buzz from these cookies...

I didn't necessarily need to bake anything today, but I woke up this morning itchin' to make some noise and make a mess in the kitchen. There was only one hitch though, I knew we were going to spend a good chunk of our mid-morning away from the house getting some errands done. After bouncing a few ideas off Jeff, I settled on making these Chocolate Espresso Snowcaps as the dough needed to rest in the refrigerator anyway.

My mom has been making a version of these cookies, commonly referred to as Chocolate Crinkles, for years - these, however, are a bit more rich with a deep chocolate flavor. Since I was already using melted bittersweet chocolate in the dough, I used a dark Dutch-process cocoa powder for an intense, yet less bitter, additional chocolate layer. To heighten the chocolate notes, instant espresso powder is added to the dry ingredients - while it does add a coffee element to the cookies, it doesn't overwhelm the chocolate.

Once the dough had chilled out in the refrigerator while we were gone (you can speed up the process by putting it in the freezer), we portioned it out and rolled the dough into balls. The next step is important - you want to give the black dough a generous double coating in powdery white confectioners' sugar (I think I could have done a better job at coating ours!). You don't want any of the chocolate color to show through as this will give you the best well defined cracks on top as they spread in the oven. The baked cookies were soft with slightly crisp edges that lead to a delicious fudgy center - Jeff said they were teetering on being brownies in cookie form. I think we both agreed that these may just have to find a spot in our Christmas baking spree 2008 list!

12 comments:

I make a version of these for Christmas and I roll them first in granulated sugar and then in powdered sugar which gives them a pristine white coating. The contrast of the dark cookie with the bright white coating is fabulous.

New to your blog and just love it! I'm completely awed by your total love of food, and the consistant creativity - it seems like you come up with something neat to cook every day. Do you EVER have an off day when you just want take out??!!

I love these cookies (I call them volcanoes)! Simple to make yet delicious. I like your addition of espresso powder.

My recipe is a bit difference in that the butter and chocolate is melted together on the stove, then removed and the sugar and eggs are beaten in. It'll be interesting to make your recipe to see what the difference beating the butter will make. But first, I need to buy more espresso powder!

Hi, Love your recipes. the ones we have made are already "favorites." Only one problem, whenever I print out a recipe it uses up about 4 pages of paper for a two page recipe. Am I missing something? Is there a way to reduce the paper use? Thanks, Bernie and Doug

Doug - You can do a couple things to prevent that. Copy and paste the recipe into a word processor or a program like notepad or just select the text of the recipe and use print selection. At some point, we would love to have an option to use a button to print the recipe only though!

Where have you found instant espresso powder in the TC area?! I've been going ballistic for the better part of the past week trying to find it for a recipe. Have substituted instant coffee granules for the espresso powder called for and am dying to try the recipe the way it was intended.TIA,MZ